The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) was created by Green Integer and its publisher, Douglas Messerli, in 2000. The Project publishes regular anthologies of major international poets and actively archives biographies of poets and listings of their titles.

July 12, 2011

Gilbert Sorrentino

Gilbert Sorrentino (USA)1929-2006

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1929, Gilbert Sorrentino attended Brooklyn College. He founded the magazine Neon in 1956 with college friends, including the novelist Hubert Selby, Jr.

The magazine survived until 1960, the year in which the author published his first book of poetry, The Darkness Surrounds Us, issued by the renowned Jargon Society, headed by Jonathan Williams. The following year Sorrentino took on the editorial position of Kulchur, a magazine and later press supported by Lita Hornick, which he would edit until 1963.

After working closely with Selby in editing his 1964 novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Sorrentino published is second collection of poetry, Black and White. The Perfect Fiction followed in 1968, but in the meantime he had published his first fiction, The Sky Changes (1966), which would become the author's primary genre.

Over the years of his life, Sorrentino wrote dozens of longer and shorter fictions, including masterworks such as Mulligan Stew (1979), Aberration of Starlight (1980), Blue Pastoral (1983), and Gold Fools (Green Integer, 2001). Several of his fictions and poems use Oulipoean strategies, such as in Gold Fools, where every sentence of the work is a question.

Throughout most of his writing, Sorrentino was an inventive satirist, with affinities to the Irish writer, Flann O'Brien. In several of his fictions, characters from other fictions appeared along with riffs and attacks upon each other. At times, Sorrentino's writing could be brutally cynical, but often the writing displayed a deep American romanticism.

In 1965, the poet was hired as an editor at Grove Press, where he worked until 1970. One of his major editorial projects there was The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But soon thereafter, Sorrentino began to teach creative writing at various universities, including Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, the University of Scranton, and the New School for Social Research. In 1982 Sorrentino was hired as a full professor in English at Stanford University, where he taught until 1999, returning to Brooklyn.

Other major works of poetry include The Orangery, his Selected Poems: 1958-1980, and his final New and Selected Poems (2004).

Among his many awards were two Guggenheim fellowships, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.

Sorrentino died on May 18, 2006. A posthumous novel, The Abyss of Human Allusion, with a preface by his writer-son Christopher Sorrentino, appeared in 2010.